2018 Targets

No messing about. Here are my hobby goals for 2018...

<Edited to include details of what needs doing to the ebay orks>

Iron Warriors

• Paint Terminators
• Prime and paint Helbrute
• Prime and paint more Contemptor
• Build, prime and paint some warpsmiths
• Paint Terminator Lord
• Paint Land Raider
• Paint the Skuldrake

Imperial Guard

• Paint the Stormhammer
• Paint two Valkyries

Inquisition Stuff

• Build up some more inquisitor stuff and warbands

Deathwatch

• Build and paint the marines in the deathwatch box
• Build and paint the tyranids in the deathwatch box

Orks

• Paint 3 Big Gunz
• Paint Stompa
• Paint 10 Meganobz
• Repaint 2nd ed dread
• Repaint all my 2nd ed Goffs and Grots (dear god why do I want to do that)
• Finish off 2 battlewagons
• Finish off loads of buggies
• Paint bunch of deffcoptas
• Finish off my superheavy
• Start the custom Battlewagon
• See what needs to be done with the bunch of orks I got off ebay:
• Update squad of boyz
• Update Mega Armoured Nobz
• Update Bikerz
• Update a Trukk
• Finished 2 Trukks
• Paint 3 Killa Kanz
• Update Deff Dredd
• Paint Battlewagon
• Paint flyer

Dystopian Wars

• Finish British Fleet
• Finish Japanese Fleet
• Finish Merchant ships
• Finish 3 oil rigs
• Finish 2 lighthouses
• Finish 2 islands

Terrain

• Pain the Wall of Martyrs Stuff
• Aquila Strongpoint
• Vengeance Weapon Battery
• Imperial Bunker
• Imperial Defence Network
• Imperial Defence Line
• Firestorm Redoubt
• Do something with the sector mechanicus lit I got for crimbo

Hobby Stuff

• PLAY SOME GAMES
• This is really important. Want to do this so much.
• Come up with some way of displaying some stuff
• Set up a new hobby space

Necromunda

• Dig out old Goliaths
• Get the new stuff!

Thanks for reading and LETS DO THIS!!

2017: A Year in Review

2017 over and done with. How did I do on the hobby front? 

33

33 models painted. Not that great considering I managed 100+ last year, but then again I did buy a house in the middle of summer so quite predictably that put pretty much anything not house related onto the back burner. I've not painted, well, anything since then. I moved in in early December and I haven't got my hobby stuff unpacked yet. But then again, I'm not suffering from a lack of motivation or anything. In fact my mind is surging with 40k possibilities! I need to sort a hobby space out. The new Necromunda stuff is making me feel funny.

The Blog

The top 10 posts of my blog feature 8 from 2017. This is pretty cool. I am still pretty keen on blogging being my main outlet for 40k stuff, although various people I follow on twitter and what not seem keen to put their blogs on hiatus or whatever. I fully intend to keep on blogging.

The Hobby

The Good

• Made awesome (for me anyway!) progress on my Iron Warriors. A box full of painted kit makes me very happy. This army is now pretty much wrapped up.
• Found some awesome ideas on yaktribe, in particular this stuff about a vertical hive. Defo going to pinch that idea. By the way, this site and community is fantastic and very welcoming.

The Bad

• Not enough games. Only played a couple
• I miss my Orks

The Ugly

• Still not played Dystopian Wars. Will do one day. This is the same as last year. Plus Spartan games unfortunately shut up shop.

The List

Here is the target list of 2017, with some stuff ticked off...

Iron Warriors

• Paint Chosen
• Paint Havocs
• Paint Terminators
• Prime more Terminators
• Prime Bikers
• Build, prime and paint the raptors
• Build, prime and paint more helbrutes
• Build, prime and paint some warsmiths
• Paint Terminator Lord
• Paint Land Raider

Last year was defo the year of the Iron Warriors. Still not quite finished tho. I did finish a helbrute, but then I started another. Oh well. I also nearly finished about 20 termies. 

Imperial Guard

• Paint the Stormhammer
• Paint two Valkyries

Inquisition Stuff

• Build up some more inquisitor stuff and warbands

I found out this year that one of my uni buddies is a stealth 40k fan. After a catch up on messenger, we kind of agreed to have a game. This is awesome

Deathwatch

• Build and paint the marines in the deathwatch box
• Build and paint the tyranids in the deathwatch box

Orks

• Paint 3 Big Gunz
• Paint Stompa
• Paint 10 Meganobz
• Repaint 2nd ed dread
• Repaint all my 2nd ed Goffs and Grots (dear god why do I want to do that)
• Finish off 2 battlewagons
• Finish off loads of buggies
• Paint bunch of deffcoptas
• See what needs to be done with the bunch of orks I got off ebay:

Didn't do anything with Orks this year. Not good.

Dystopian Wars

• Finish British Fleet
• Finish Japanese Fleet
• Finish Merchant ships
• Finish 3 oil rigs
• Finish 2 lighthouses
• Finish 2 islands

Hobby Stuff

• PLAY SOME GAMES
• This is really important. Want to do this so much.
• Come up with some way of displaying some stuff
• Pain the Wall of Martyrs Stuff
• Aquila Strongpoint
• Vengeance Weapon Battery
• Imperial Bunker
• Imperial Defence Network
• Imperial Defence Line
• Firestorm Redoubt

Not painting that terrain sucks. Naughty me.

Well I guess it is all history now. Onwards to 2018!

Thanks for reading.

Back To Blogging

Hi all..

I haven't been doing much blogging about pretty much anything really, but I'm hoping to get a few posts lined up from now through to the end the year because I have been fairly busy overall.

I have also started posting things as and when they are finished on instagram as @aljmclean

A trip to Golden Demon in May this year totally reloaded my creativity and I cracked on with some building and painting and what not...

After some awesome models and what not I decided to do a spot of building. I had a Lego propeller knocking about so I set about building some sort of underhive wind turbine...

So the plan is to have a tentacle creeping up out of some underhive sludge around the base of the turbine.

Before I knew if it my hobby mojo was back and I was painting like a thing what paints a bunch of stuff.

Thanks for reading!

Summer Happened

Hello!

So once again summer came round, my hobby time fell through the floor and my posts dried up. But fear not, I am going to get back into the swing of things, hopefully.

I also noticed that my blog has not crept of 6000 views, which is pretty cool if you ask me. Thanks for hitting refresh all them times whoever you are!

So, some things that distracted me were...

Warhammer world!

Some mega hot sauce. I mean this is some serious flavour in a bottle.

Went up a Welsh mountain in the typical early summer

Found a rusty landy

Started playing x-wing more. Yay more expensive miniatures to buy.

Went to Norfolk for a wedding shindig. Street Morris Dancing broke out

Learned that peacocks can actually fly. Or at least jump

Watched a rugby match. Go Wigan!

Went to Geneva for an awesome wedding party with  awesome russians

Went to Rockfest Barcelona

A friend kept on falling asleep after drinking beer!

Upon my return to blighty. another mate promptly fell asleep in the pub. For like an hour. Must be the way I tells them.

Got close enough to hack that portal

Found a rusty boat

Watched Europe burn beneath a tidal wave of ufos

Went up another mountain in the traditional british summer. This time in the Lake District

I started reading the Mistborn trilogy. Awesome.

Finally, I came "this" close to being a Nightwish fan, but it turns out that it is just that one song after all.

Thanks for reading!

2015: The Plan

Here are the big projects that I want to get to the bottom of this year:

• Iron Warriors. I have ton of primed stuff waiting to be finished. This is the big one.
• Imperial Guard. Wrap up my current paint queue and finish off my guard army. This shouldn't be too much of a massive undertaking.
• Orks. Finish painting the Stompa, big gunz and my scratch built superheavy thing.
• Imperial fortifications.
• Dystopian Wars. Finish off the Japanese, British and Merchant fleets and the bits of scenery.
• Inquisition. Build a few inquisitors and their retinues. This is probably the lowest priority since I recall seeing some rumours that there was going to be a proper codex release for these guys at some point.
• Renegades. I got a copy of IA13 and I love it. I'm thinking that the core of my imperial guard could be used as the basis of the troops and that with appropriate bits and pieces being added for the more chaosy things. This isn't really a goal. More just a ponderance.
• Fluff. I want to write a few fluff articles to get some thoughts down on paper to help focus my hobby terrain
• Terrain. I have plans for some hive type stuff that I want to explore
• Play some games. I'm thinking quarterly 40k, monthly killteam. Plus a couple of Dystopian Wars.
• Megadesk. I will build megadesk. It will be mega.

The Rules

I'm imposing a rule on myself from now. I am not allowed to buy stuff until I finish painting stuff to a table top standard. I need to do this because this year I built and primed my Iron Warriors only to buy more Imperial Guard. Then on a whim, part way through the guard I decided to build some assassins, servitors and other stuff. Now mixing things up is defo a good idea but knowing that I have a bunch of stuff to work through does tend to get me down. NEVER AGAIN.

This is what I am going to do:

For every three dudes painted I can build one dude

• Tanks allow me to build two dudes or one tank
• Superheavies allow me to build three dudes or one tank

Now. For each project there are a bunch of painting targets:

Iron Warriors

• Paint Berserkers
• Paint Plague Marines
• Paint Chosen
• Paint Possessed
• Paint Havocs
• Paint Khan
• Paint Terminators
• Paint Terminator Lord
• Paint Spawn
• Paint Obliterators
• Paint Hellbrute
• Paint Land Raider

Imperial Guard

• Paint 5 Ratling Snipers
• Paint 4 Assassins
• Paint 3 Psykers
• Paint Special Weapons Squad
• Paint Heavy Weapons Dudes
• Paint Hostile Environment Squad
• Paint two standard bearers
• Paint two sergeants and medicmedic
• Paint 2 Commissars
• Paint Creed
• Paint tech priest and 2 servitors
• Paint Wyvern
• Paint Leman Russ
• Paint Chimera
• Paint Colossus

Orks

• Paint 3 Big Gunz
• Paint Stompa
• Paint 10 Meganobz
• Repaint 2nd ed dread
• Repaint all my 2nd ed Goffs and Grots (dear god why do I want to do that)
• Finish off 2 battlewagons
• Finish off loads of buggies
• Paint bunch of deffcoptas

Dystopian Wars

• Finish British Fleet
• Finish Japanese Fleet
• Finish Merchant ships
• Finish 3 oil rigs
• Finish 2 lighthouses
• Finish 2 islands

Games Played

• Monthly kill team
• Quarterly 40k
• Dystopian Wars

Imperial Fortifications

• Paint Imperial Defence Line
• Paint Defence Emplacement
• Paint 2 Firestorm redoubts
• Paint bunker
• Paint Aquilla Strongpoint
• Paint 4 Vengeance Weapon Baterries

Fluff

• Background on my IG regiment
• Link in the inquisitorial presence
• Through in the chaos stuff

Final thought...

Dear god. That is a lot of stuff. Mind you having it all there in front of me is quite satisfying in its own way. I suspect there is well more than a years worth of stuff there, but such is life. I'm well keen to crack on with all this. Wish me luck!

2014: That was the Year that Was

Right. So I'm starting to write this on boxing day. I have a couple of hours to spare before more family visitations go down and since I can't quite be bothered doing anything too creative I thought I would draft together a year in review type thing...

The Blog

Not really familiar with the Google stats tools, but here goes:

• Total Posts: 50
• Total Views: 1958

Top Posts

So what can I make of all this? Well I'm pretty chuffed that I've managed an average of one post a week for a whole year, especially considering the summer break and nothingness. So thank you for reading this. Extra mega-thanks to my 4 followers. Hi 5s and brofists all round.

Looking at the top posts it appears that by far the one with the most hits is the paint station thingy that i put together in response to this post here over at cadian shock. I think that this shows the value of actually engaging with my fellow bloggers out there. I got to admit that I am more of a lurker than a commenter so i should probably do something about that. In fact this comment appear as my top traffic source. Can't really argue with those facts!

The Hobby

The Good

• I guess that it must the guard stuff. Finally making a dent in my haul of shame and turning then into a (nearly) reasonably completed army.
• Completing the Iron Warriors build phase. I even primed them!
• My assassins - really enjoyed building them.

The Bad

• Not even starting to paint my iron warriors. Very naughty of me.
• Only played a couple of games this year. Like maybe 2 tops? Going to try and get one in before the new year. We'll see.
• Not done any inquisition stuff. I have a bunch of ideas burning away for these but I'm trying to become more disciplined about my hobby.

The Ugly

• Orks not getting any attention. Hardly touched them this year. Really need to sort that out. They even had a new codex! I think it was this year that I primed my stompa and that is pretty much the only progress for these guys.
• Still not played Dystopian Wars. Will do one day.

Outside The Hobby

Stuff happens in real life too! Been at my job for a year and a bit now and i'm really enjoying it. On a personal level things have been developing too. I've started hiking loads this year and met some cool people doing so. 

On a down note I haven't been keeping up with various groups of friends as much as I would like. Visits to the Swan have dropped off, I mean who would have thought that doing healthy stuff, like hiking and running would mean that I find it harder to do the unhealthy liver punishing activities that are also fun. I've got friends spread all over the place (Bristol, York, London, Norwich, Auckland, USA) and I see some more than others and some not at all. Pretty sad really. I rarely see local people never mind those who live further afield.

This year I properly got into Powerwolf. They are truly excellent. Best gig was Battlebeast at Rockharz over the summer.

My favourite movie is either Guardians of the Galaxy or The Raid 2.Too close to call.

Best TV show is either Arrow or Flash, I love those two shows. Honourable mention to Extant which I thought was most excellent.

Thank you 2014

I have made new friiends, found new music, done some good hobby stuff. Overall this was a good year. 

Nought to painting in less than 2 parsecs

Ripping off Inspired by this post by trooper over at cadian shock right here I thought that I would share a set up that lets me quickly get my shit together and start some painting. In reverse order we have..

Ready to get some painting on! Got this wooden paint tray thing from warlord games a while back. Its sturdy and mobile. Just what I want. So I have the paints I use most often at the back and whatever I am working on front and centre. The green box has got my wet palette in. Just behind that are two small glass jars that I use to clean my brushes. On the left is an old wacken cup that I use put waste water as the session progresses. I empty and refill the glass ones so that they are always kind of clean.

XBMC on my PC and a mug o tea close by means I can paint for ages. Well. Thats the theory.

The tray fits into a massive box, with other boxes underneath the tray and around and about holding other paint and WIP. Of which there is much. More WIP gets piled on where it can. Look some Dystopian Wars stuff has appeared on the green box!

The box goes into a cupboard and has other boxes of 40k paraphernalia around and about. Those are muffin trays that I got from ASDA and make good iron warrior (and at a push, Ork) storage.

So yeah. Dead quick to get out of the cupboard and takes minutes to set up and put away. Its about the only part of the 40k hobby that I think I have sussed out!

Thanks for reading,

Al

Playing with myself

My blog that is!

I added a blogroll to my blog! I think I'm going to put links to those wonderful people who follow my blog on there, plus a few others that provide kick ass inspiration.

Add a comment if you want to be added below and I will do so!

Summer Is Over

So summer is pretty much wrapping up and I'm finding myself with the free time required to get back into some hobby stuff again. I know that my scheduled posts dried up some time ago, but fear not, my summer was not spent entirely 40kless! Between music festivals, weekends away, walking up hills, running up hills, visiting people, a couple of BBQs and general shenanigans i kind of managed to keep things going at a low level so I've got  a few things to draw from and post about starting from next week.

Its also been about 9 months of me doing this blog stuff which has seen me get 400 odd page views and 3 followers! Thanks you guys. What with the year mark coming up i think i'll start thinking about some sort of review and goals type thing. 

Anyway keep reading for an idea of the distractions that prevented me from full on hobby awesomeness...

Aside

Forgive the indulgence, but I'm quite happy with the progress that I am making with my guard. I find the painting aspects of this hobby the most challenging, mainly cos I suck and i can find it frustrating at times, but I think i am actually beginning to make some real progress. Seeing the guard come together is really satisfying. 

With just the officers left to finish off it is time to ponder what is next. After running the sums, it looks as though I have enough soldiers to field a CCS and platoon with a PCS and two infantry squads. Not many points, but better than a knee to the happy sacks. Looking at what other bits I have lined up my mind turns to what bits I need to crack on.

Off the top of my head:

• Three pairs of legs plus three guardsmen will complete my forgeworld hostile environment plasma gunners as a SPS;
• 4 more guardsmen and another special weapons dude will let me move the heavy weapon teams from the IS to form a HWS;
• I need a bunch (3) of kneeling down legs to finish off the heavy weapon dudes;
• I have aspirations for fielding an inquisitor and henchmen and using this as a way in to INQ28 stuff (I think that this aspect of the hobby represents a precipice of modelling / painting / narrative gaming), for which i need tons of bits
• 7th Ed rules / box set

So do I go all out and get me a cadian defence force which will provide me with enough stuff to complete my immediate goals plus give me more stuff for the INQ28 attack? Or do I get just what I need? Plus I need to replace my airbrush to continue with my Imperial Guard and Iron Warrior armies. Plus I'm not made of money.

Anyway, here are some pictures of stuff that I painted a while back...

A Leman Russ and a sentinal. I used my airbrush, the well established salt and airspray weathering technique, plus weathering powers, oil paints and varnish.

Proper chuffer at how they turned out!